Live data from Hacker News

I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

parallella.org

1–10 of 34 posts

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#3
Having read through the documents, I see that it is capable of ~200 GFLOPS. Obviously, this outshines my macbook performance of ~50GFLOPS, but it is substantially less than my workstations GPU, an Nvidia GTX 770, capable of ~3000 GFLOPS.

I suppose my question is why would I choose to build something like this over using a GPU?

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#5

Having read through the documents, I see that it is capable of ~200 GFLOPS. Obviously, this outshines my macbook performance of ~50GFLOPS, but it is substantially less than my workstations GPU, an Nvidia GTX 770, capable of ~3000 GFLOPS. I suppose my question is why would I choose to build something like this over using a GPU?

Here's some previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4702456

In terms of raw GFLOPS, you shouldn't.

Parallela offers something halfway between a multi-CPU cluster, differing in terms of memory access, and a GPU, differing in that each core is a real core and can be independently making calls, branching, etc.

Another point to note is that every GPU architecture is different and that some support a different degree of control flow parallelism vs. data parallelism.

Ultimately it depends on the kernel you're working with - if you're to a point where you've got strictly linear SIMD and you depend entirely on floating-point math throughput or memory bandwidth, it wouldn't make sense not to use a GPU instead.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#6

Having read through the documents, I see that it is capable of ~200 GFLOPS. Obviously, this outshines my macbook performance of ~50GFLOPS, but it is substantially less than my workstations GPU, an Nvidia GTX 770, capable of ~3000 GFLOPS. I suppose my question is why would I choose to build something like this over using a GPU?

I guess it is easier to program, I am only a simple web developer and i would be more productive programming on this than learning to use cuda.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#9
post #7

I can see one fan at the top of the cylinder- is only one fan really sufficient? It looks like this would generate a large amount of heat. I would be quite interested to see the temperatures this gets up to.

It's a pretty big fan. Also, the cylindrical design certainly helps airflow
Post reply on HN